The True Costs of "Cheap" Oil Part 1: The Toll On Ocean Life

It's not hard to be bewildered and overwhelmed by a massive disaster like the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Contemplating something of this magnitude is like trying to visualize the size of the Sun or the number googleplex: we aren't wired to consider things of this magnitude.   It requires a few sequential analogies in order to wrap one's mind around these behemoths.

If we could all truly understand just how large of a disaster this is, then maybe we would be willingly to change our lifestyles, petition our governments to rail against the insane and suicidal practices of fossil fuel corporations, and work hard to create a new paradigm based on sustainability.


Here's my attempt at understanding the toll the BP spill has taken on ocean life.


The Gulf Mexico is approx. 660 quadrillion gallons of water. That's a big number to imagine! (660,000,000,000,000,000 or 660 X 10>15) Let's pair it down a bit....


It seems obvious by now that petroleum, and chemicals contained within it like benzene, are harmful pollutants.  But can we somehow quantify just how bad it is, or at least do so in this particular situation.  According to the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental affairs, it takes 1 quart of motor oil to contaminate 250,000 gallons of ocean and make it unsuitable for most life.

This gives us the simple equation:

One gallon of oil= 1 million gallons of dead ocean.


Now let's try and make the Gulf of Mexico's 660 quadrillion gallons into a more comprehensible amount by relating it to this 1 to 1 million ratio of oil to dead ocean.


How many million-gallons of ocean is the Gulf of Mexico?

660 quadrillion would be 660 billion million gallons.


It follows that the equation for the death of the ENTIRE Gulf of Mexico is:


660 billion gallons of oil= 1 dead Gulf of Mexico.


How much oil has been spilled/how much of the Gulf is already dead?


The exact amount of the spill is up for debate. Estimates range between 1 million gallons-a-day to 4 million gallons-a-day. Let's hope for the best and shoot for a low of 1 million gallons.


Still, 1 million gallons of spilled oil equals 1 million million gallons of dead ocean.
That's a staggering amount of water: one trillion gallons; or 1.5 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.   

So what was the "death toll" for the entire oil spill?

One trillion gallons of ocean was 'killed' every single day between April 20th and July 29th. (It actually took until Sept. 19 to completely kill the well and there were different leak rates after the topkill process that began on July 15th, so we'll just aim low again.)


This human-created hole in the ground was spewing oil into open ocean for approximately 100 days.


That means that the 'best' case scenario here is that 100 million gallons has been spilled into the ocean. That's almost TEN Exxon Valdez spills!

How much ocean is now affected? 100 TRILLION gallons of ocean is unsuitable for life.

More than a 6,000th of the Gulf of Mexico is now "dead". 


Sadly, it is quite possible that the spill might be FOUR or more times as large as this. Just the fact that BP wouldn't let scientists down there to calculate the precise rate of flow was alarming. Video footage gave some researchers data that suggested that even a minimum estimate of 70,000 barrels a day, or about 3 million gallons a day, was a considerably low estimate.


We are likely looking at spill that was 40 times as bad as the Exxon Valdez, a spill that has "killed" more than a 1,500th of the entire Gulf of Mexico.


There are nearly 4,000 oil rigs (as of 2006) in the Gulf of Mexico. If only 1,500 of those 4,000 had a similar accident, the entire Gulf of Mexico would be dead.   If this disaster shows the potential risk factor that just one of these rigs has, then its conceivable that these rigs could kill off ALL the ocean life in the Gulf of Mexico, TWICE.


And yet, as alarming as this spill is, it is not anything new and is certainly not the worst the world has seen. A quick look at the lists of oil spills in the past 20 years reveals that there have been major oil spills every single year except two (the only exceptions being 1995 and 2005). The list of the largest oil spills in history (spills of 30 million gallons or more) doesn't even include the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon is only the fifth largest.


The total from this list (NOT including the Deepwater Horizon spill): more than 1.3 billion gallons of spilled oil. That's 1.3 quadrillion gallons of dead ocean, or a 500th of the Gulf of Mexico.


Now I'd like to take a sobering look at how the BP spill compares to our total oil consumption as a species. The numbers, once again, are staggering. When looked at in comparison with the Deepwater Horizon spill and its affect on the ocean, we'll see that our daily use of oil is a far, far greater problem.


All the countries in the world combined are currently burning 3,500,000,000 gallons of oil every day. 3.5 billion gallons a day. (Actually, these are 2007 estimates, and they have likely gone up since then and will continue to go up for as long as production can keep up.)


This means that every 188 days humans burn enough oil, which, if dumped into the ocean instead of burned and sent up into the atmosphere, would effectively end all life in the entire Gulf of Mexico. Since 2007 we've burned enough oil to "kill an ocean"... 6 times over.


The U.S. alone burns nearly 1 billion gallons of oil a day, almost as much as the sum total of all of the worst oil spills in history, combined. About every two years (660 days), the U.S. burns that same ocean-killing amount.


If every day the U.S. is consuming more than 10 times the spillage from Deepwater Horizon (and sending its pollutants up into our atmosphere), we need to seriously rethink our way of life. Our oil consumption is the 'leak' that is the root of all others and the one that most desperately needs to be addressed.


Finally, let's look at human oil consumption and its total affect on Earth's water supply as well as the ultimate future of oil.

The total amount of water on the planet -in the oceans, underground, and in the air- is about 366.3 sextillion gallons. That's about 555,000 Gulf-of-Mexicos.


Analysts agree that humanity has consumed a total of about 800 billion barrels of oil. That's over 33 quadrillion gallons.  Enough to "kill" more than 50 Gulf-of-Mexicos worth of ocean.


Optimists say that we have at most 1,800 billion barrels of oil left in the ground. At our 29 billion barrel a year consumption rate that gives us at the very most 62 more years of consuming oil at our current rate. After which we will have burned a grand total of 2,600 billion barrels of oil.

That's over 100,000 BILLION or 100 quadrillion gallons of oil which, if measured by its impact on life in water, would result in 160 Gulf-of-Mexicos worth of dead ocean.  So the end game, if we actually go about burning up everything we possibly can, is this: by 2072 humanity will have killed (through oil consumption alone) well over a 3,000th of Earth's ENTIRE water supply.

Now the analogy may break down a bit here, but for a second let's just consider this fact: Only 1% of Earth's water supply is usable to humans.   If trends continue, we will have ruined 34% or over a third of our entire planet's usable water supply by 2072.  And that's only considering oil consumption as contamination when there are in fact thousands upon thousands of other pollutants putting our water at risk.


It's amazing to think that we can make that much of an impact on so mammoth of a scale as "all of the water on Earth". Yet that it the truth that is now staring us in the face. For the survival of this biosphere and for our own species, we need to recognize the immense power that we collectively have on the biosphere of this planet and wield this power much more wisely.


Please consider sending letters to your senators and representatives, writing letters to the editor, and talking to friends and family.  We as a society need to take a comprehensive look at the true cost of our oil dependency and to suggest sweeping and immediate measures to move our country away from fossil fuels and to lay the groundwork for a future of renewable energy.   Also consider donating money to organizations like 350.org which are leading the way towards solving our dire environmental problems.    Thanks for reading.